Holub was an immunologist as well as a poet and essayist. This account of how he has to deal with the messy consequences of his neighbour shooting a muskrat is both lyrical and laconic, fusing an empathy for the dying animal with a wonderment at just how complex the passage from life to death can be:
“The blood wasn’t just that unpleasant stuff that under proper and normal conditions belonged inside the muskrat. It was the muskrat’s secret life forced out. This puddle of red sea was, in fact, a vestige of an ancient Silurian sea… In any case, the muskrat was cast ashore from its own little red sea. Billions of red blood cells were coagulating and disintegrating, their hemoglobin molecules puzzled as to how and where to pass their four molecules of oxygen.”
First published in Science, 1986, and included in Shedding Life: Disease, Politics and Other Human Conditions, Milkweed Editions, 1997
A Personal Anthology 